Jeff Tucker and Dusty Hyland look at the finer points of turning your world upside down.

The handstand can be one of the most undervalued movements within the CrossFit community or where sport is concerned. Nevertheless, its application and regular performance for skill sets can be applied to better movement within any field of sport where athleticism is involved.

To the novice or within our community, the handstand is sometimes seen merely as a basic tool within gymnastics sport—or a cool party trick. Its benefits, for example, include but are not limited to balance, strength, spatial perception/awareness, core-control development, isometric strength development, and so on. And these are but a few fringe benefits from basic skill sets before adding walking drills or ranges of motion with disadvantaged leverage to a handstand.

A large-volume book could be written on handstands and how this basic gymnastics tool can change your daily fitness goals and improve so much of your game. In this series, we will be offering several things to consider as you work at multiple levels to accomplish inverted goals. We’ll take this basic movement and delve into load core control via hollow-body bracing in the inverted, locked-out position.

The muscle-up doesn’t have to be some mystical beast tamable only by the elite. Anyone can learn and perform muscle-ups using progressions and scaling. In this video series, learn how HQ… Continue Reading

The CrossFit Journal is a chronicle of the empirically driven, clinically tested, and community developed CrossFit program. Our mission is to provide a venue for contributing coaches, trainers, athletes, and researchers to ponder, study, debate, and define fitness and collectively advance the art and science of optimizing human performance.